Now that AGU, the holidays, and the ESIP meeting are out of the way, we can get started with the new ESDSWG working groups. I will shortly be sending the working group technical chairs the lists of people who expressed interest in each of the working groups at the ESDSWG meeting and inviting the WG chairs to get in contact with the WG membership to initiate the activities described in their action plans. Some of those action plans are still undergoing a bit of fine-tuning but the WG chairs and ESDIS POCs should be getting them finalized in the next week or so.

I realize that not everyone was able to attend the ESDSWG meeting, may not have entered their working group preferences on the proposal assessment survey, or may have since changed their minds about which working groups they would like to work with; that's not a problem. The WG chairs will initially reach out to the people who expressed an interest at 'contributor' level or above and ask them to confirm their continued interest in contributing to the working group. If you want to be added to the contributor list for a working group, please contact the relevant WG chair directly and let me know so that I can keep track of where everyone is supposed to be. Based on the initial responses, it looks like we have a reasonable spread of participation across the WGs. In the event that one or more groups is over-subscribed we may have to ask some people to consider looking at an alternative group but, hopefully, that will not be necessary. If you are interested in following the activities of one of the groups but do not intend to be an active participant (we referred to this as an observer role at the ESDSWG meeting) then you do not need to do anything for now; we will be making separate arrangements for ESDSWG members to follow activities of all of the working groups.

Please note there will be no specific requirement for the WGs to hold open telecons on a regular schedule. It will be up to each individual WG to establish its own way of working and communication. Some groups may choose to only hold regular telecons for the active contributors and more hold occasional open telecons to keep everyone else informed on their activities. Other groups may choose to use the wiki as their primary means of collaboration. Rama plans to hold a monthly status check telecon for the data stewardship interest area (provisionally proposed for the 1st Thursday at 4:00 PM ET) but we will not require everyone in the data stewardship WGs to attend every telecon.

The standards interest area TWGs will be working on authoring or reviewing RFCs and have a very specific role in the ESDIS standards process. We will be coordinating these groups' activities between ESDSWG and the ESDIS standards office and making a separate announcement about the operation of these groups.

We plan to use the new Earthdata wiki (Confluence - http://wiki.earthdata.nasa.gov/display/ESDSWG) for as much of our WG collaboration as possible. (For example, the WGs should use Confluence for creating and reviewing draft documents, wherever possible.) Confluence has some interesting capabilities for creating content, sending notifications on content updates, allowing blog postings, following users, and allowing comments on content. I am just starting to learn about some of this but Ross Bagwell and Minnie Wong will be available to help us with some of the technical issues. I would like to avoid setting up separate mailing lists for each of the WGs (although we can do this if really necessary.)

If you haven't yet set up a Confluence account, send an email to Ross Bagwell or Minnie Wong and request an ESDSWG Confluence account. Please make sure that you tell them your URS username or NASA AUID. The old ESDSWG wiki (MediaWiki - http://earthdata.nasa.gov/wiki/main/index.php/ESDSWG) will shortly be decommissioned.


Independent Working Groups

  • Cloud Computing. Technical Chairs: Brian Wilson, Emily Law. ESDIS POC: Kevin Murphy.
  • Earth Science Collaboratory. Technical Chairs: Chris Lynnes, Brian Wilson. ESDIS POCs: Drew Kittel, Dave Bachelor.
  • Geospatial. Technical Chairs: Paul Ramirez, Chris Mattmann. ESDIS POC: Ryan Boller.
  • Open Source. Technical Chairs: Chris Mattmann, Bob Downs. ESDIS POC: Kevin Murphy.
  • Semantic Mashups. Technical Chairs: Brian Wilson + TBA. ESDIS POC: Luther Lighty.
  • Technology Infusion. Technical Chair: Karen Moe, Hook Hua. ESDIS POC: Jeff Walter.
  • User Needs Analysis. Technical Chairs: Chris Lynnes, Vicky Wolf. ESDIS POC: Nate James.
  • Visualization. Technical Chairs: Charles Thompson, Tom Sohre. ESDIS POC: Ryan Boller.

Data Stewardship Interest Area. ESDIS POC: Rama

  • DOIs. Technical Chair: Curt Tilmes. ESDIS POC: Nate James.
  • ESDS Conventions for HDF5. Technical Chairs: Charlie Zender, Peter Leonard. ESDIS POC: Dan Marinelli.
  • Preservation Information Architecture. Technical Chair: Joe Glassy. ESDIS POC: Rama.
  • PROV-ES Earth Science Extension to W3C PROV. Technical Chair: Hook Hua. ESDIS POC: Rama.

Standards Interest Area. ESDIS POC: Andy Mitchell

  • Datacasting Standard TWG.
  • Preservation Content TWG.
  • GeoTIFF Standard TWG.
  • KML Standard TWG.
  • OpenSearch Standard TWG.